


Reconciliation

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [21]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Abuser POV, Abuser Redemption, Also Dr Carmilla Mysteriously Enough I Wonder How That Happened, Complicated Relationships, Complicated Relationships With Home, Consent Issues, Control Issues, Death to the Mechanisms Spoilers, Dissociation, Dr Carmilla Has ADHD, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mechanisms Typical Body Horror, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nastya WILL Get Character Development Even If I Have To Drag Her Through It, Not Quite Forgiveness, Panic Attacks, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation, The Mechanisms Are Chaotic Evil, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence, canon atypical communication, hiraeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23738248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: This will never be enough. Not for Nastya and not for Doctor Carmilla. But it's something.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Nastya Rasputina, Dr Carmilla/Loreli, The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina
Series: Demon Eyes [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	1. To Begin (Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This will never be enough. Not for Nastya and not for Doctor Carmilla. But it's something.

It's a mistake, perhaps.

Almost definitely. But Carmilla knew what the taste of the void felt like. She knew what it meant to be trapped there, waiting for somebody, anybody to come find her. She’d tried not to let it show, how much it affected her, but there was a reason she’d pulled Brian in from the cold and the dark and the vast that one night long ago. She hadn’t known his story, hadn’t thought it through at all. Even now, she doesn’t really understand his story, doesn’t know which parts are true, but she can’t imagine she’d have made any other choice. He was one of the best of them. 

When she sees Anastasia — Nastya— floating in the depths of space, stuff hands clutches tight to the last piece of the Aurora, she barely stops to consider before she tugs her inside. 

They haven’t talked in almost a trillion years. Carmilla’s choice, mostly. She could’ve found them at any time, as easily as she had all those times the Mechanisms— mostly Jonny— flushed her out the airlock. Sometimes she even tried. But she never quite followed through on it. 

It’s a strange moment. Nastya’s always run cold even when her surface burned, and Carmilla was the opposite. It’s hard to tell now, her body so thoroughly drained of heat, but Carmilla props her up on a couch she’d managed to avoid crushing for a couple decades. She doesn’t really remember what Nastya likes to drink, so she just goes through her cupboard and makes one of everything hot. She breathes carefully, forces herself to focus on the task at hand, and mostly manages to keep from breaking anything. She hums as she works, the melody keeping her focused, and when she returns with a chamomile tea to Nastya sipping carefully on hot chocolate, she manages not to drop her cup. 

"It's you,” Nastya says. Carmilla observes the piece of the Aurora is gone. Then she notices the strangely shaped protrusion beneath Nastya’s skin. She must not have trusted Carmilla to let her keep her. She’s initially offended, but she pushes that indignation down. She’s right not to trust her, after all.

“Yes.” 

Nastya puts her drink down. Then she picks it up again. Does she notice the way her posture changed when she recognized Carmilla? So much more brittle. Her hair is longer now, held back in a pony tail. It’s been like that for a while too. There’s so much that goes unsaid, so many questions both of them have for the other but neither of them really want to hear the answers. 

“The others are gone. Not all dead, but... gone,” Carmilla says, finally. “You were out for... a while.” 

“Why?” 

“Why are they gone? Or why did I wake you?” 

Nastya nods. 

“Number of reasons. I don’t know the details on all of them, but they split up. One of the newer two, you know, with the wings—“ 

“Raphaella.” 

“Raphaella brought the Aurora with her through a black hole. Those two aren’t dead, not exactly, but you won’t see them again. Of course, you thought Aurora was already dead.” 

“I don’t want to talk about that. Especially not to you.”

She’s crying, Carmilla realizes, and she takes a step back. It’s been a long time. 

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Since when do you ask shit like that?” 

She shrugs. She can point to specific dates, but without a reference for Nastya’s timeline, it’s pretty useless. Besides, she’s pretty sure it’s a rhetorical question. 

“I can drop you off at the nearest planet with a decent interstellar hub. Or send you out into space again, if you really want to...” She doesn’t end the sentence with die or rest. Neither of the words fully encapsulates the feeling of slowing to a standstill in the monotony of the void. “I brought you in on an impulse. I don’t know if it was more than that. We don’t even need to talk, I’ll just...” 

“Don’t go,” Nastya says, as Carmilla turns to leave. 

“Is it okay if I come closer? Put the tea down?”

Nastya parses the request for a few moments, then gestures to a couch across the table with all the cups. A distance away. Not close enough to touch but closer. Closer than she deserves. Carmilla takes a roundabout route, staying as far away as the confines of the room allow. She crosses her legs and ends up drinking the tea. It scorches her tongue, but she’s used to the little pains like that. The tension in the air is palpable. They both take in the other’s presence and feel something neither of them have known in a very long time. 

“Since when do you like hot chocolate?” Nastya asks. It’s the least of the questions stewing behind those stormy eyes, but it’s safe. Except for the part where it’s not at all safe, because nothing is safe with Carmilla.

“I don’t. I’ve got a new band, my drummer's addicted to the stuff.” 

“Like us?”

 _Like you,_ Carmilla wants to correct, but she doesn’t. The loss hasn’t sunk in yet. It’s at her surface. It’ll take a long time for her to process it. That’s Carmilla’s fault too. She thought it’d be easier if it was harder for her Mechanisms to break, but she just extended their pain onto a scale of millennia. She can’t say if it’s better or worse for them, when her own mind feels as inconsistent as a butterfly, flitting from one idea and emotion to the next without concern for the scale, but she can say it’s not good. 

“Yes and no. They’re... it’s complicated. I’d let them explain, but… it’d get… what’s the right word? Complicated.” 

“Because this is already so simple,” Nastya replies. She doesn’t laugh, but there’s a sense of humor to the way she picks her words, the tone in which she says them. The two of them are speaking in Cyberian, a language that only the two of them know now. Jonny knew a handful of words and Aurora was fluent once, but they’re gone. Nastya’s words were once perfect and crisp, but her accent has since been blurred, mixed with a bit of New Texan here, a bit of Malonian street slang there. There were hints of forty ninth century Cockney and Enochian, if she listened closely enough, and… that was a Terran-Japanese lilt. Barely audible, but unflinchingly there in the way her r’s and l’s mixed. 

“They’re not Mechanisms, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

Nastya nods, but the tension in her shoulders doesn’t let up. “They want to be here.” 

It’s not the answer she was looking for, but there isn’t really an answer that would satisfy her. There’s nothing that can make up for everything Carmilla did. It’s not a crack that’s formed between them; it’s a ravine, as wide and deep as the void of space that they’d both tried to keep between the other for the years. 

“You eat any of them yet?” It’s less rude in the Cyberian phrasing of things, but it’s still abrupt. For all her years, Nastya has never become a master of social graces. Probably a result of living with others who had even less of a grasp of them and that includes Carmilla. 

“No. I’ve been better about that. Not perfect, I don’t think that’s possible, but… better.” 

“I don’t believe you.” “I don’t deserve to be believed.” 

“If you think acting nice will make me forgive you, then it won’t.” 

“I don’t deserve or want to be forgiven.”

Nastya finishes her hot chocolate and puts it back down on the table. She meets Carmilla’s eye, in a way she hadn’t done since those early days when she’d still seen Carmilla as her savior. Before she was afraid. She looks for something for a good while, and Carmilla matches her gaze. But Carmilla looks away first anyway. 

“You’re different,” she observes, finally, and examines the remaining cups. 

“Not really,” Carmilla admits. “This is all rather self-serving of me.” 

“You wouldn’t have said that before.” 

Carmilla scours her memories of her time with the Mechanisms, trying to find a comparable moment in the aftermath of all the times she went way too far and comes up empty. She wasn’t bereft of apologies and excuses, but they were all calls back to who she was instead of what she was doing. All empty words. It’s not that she disagrees with what she said then— she is a monster, she physically can’t control her hunger— but for each extended explanation, there’s something missing. 

“Huh,” she remarks. “You’re right.” 

Nastya smirks, a subtle gesture that’s quickly replaced by the same blank expression but one that Carmilla catches. She doesn’t bring attention to it. She won’t. This moment is something rare and beautiful, like both of them holding some piece of glass. They could both break it, but Carmilla’s strength would make the damage so much worse.

“You learn how to play the recorder yet?” It’s a gentle increase in pressure, a playful comment thrown out there in the storm of tumultuous emotions, and Carmilla doesn’t know how to react to it. She wants to pull back, wants to insist that Nastya tell her where she wants to end up so she can take her there and never think about this again, but that’s not an option. They’ve already gone this far. 

“That fucker,” she says, “can learn to play itself. I’ve learned so many more since, why does one measly little childish stick matter?” 

Nastya laughs, carefully and restrained but she _laughs_ , a sound Carmilla had forgotten. If she’d ever heard it at all. 

“It is you. I had myself half convinced you were a clone or some hypothermia induced hallucination.” 

Carmilla bites down on the questions about any hypothetical hallucinations because the way she’d set up the bioprogramming should’ve made that impossible; she knew what isolation did, she’d tried to cut that off before it became an issue. But she knows this too is another test of the fragile trust. Perhaps not an intentional one on Nastya’s behalf— she tries hard not to attribute malice before it is earned these days— but a test nonetheless. They both remember how Carmilla would go on about the particulars of science and how the mechanisms worked with one hand inside Nastya’s body, the other hand picking up a scalpel for some fresh cut. A reminder. 

“Nope, it really is me. Doctor Carmilla, in the flesh. Do you want some more to drink, or…?” 

“Do you mind turning the heat up?” 

It’s not just a politely phrased way of asking her to do it. Back then, in the bad days, Carmilla would always keep Aurora’s temperature near freezing for her own comfort even though she knew Nastya’s quicksilver blood and Jonny’s mechanical heart made them run cold on the inside. She’d justified it to herself by saying they just didn’t know how badly the heat hit her, but there were ways of messing with the settings so it was cold in just her lab. She hadn’t done that. On some level, she’d wanted to hurt them. 

“No,” she says and stands up. “The controls are over there, do you still want me to?” 

She points to a spot within arms reach of where Nastya is sitting, who nods. Carmilla waits for a little bit longer than necessary, prepared for her to rescind permission to approach at any moment, but she doesn’t. Carmilla still takes a roundabout route, and Nastya still stiffens again at every new movement. Both of their breathing is measured. 

The numbers are in Terran-Japanese, and it takes Carmilla longer than it should to process the controls. She brings the heat up eventually, and she feels it right away. 

“Is this okay?” Nastya nods. 

“I can get you a blanket or one of my spare cloaks or maybe…” 

“Don’t go,” she says again. Carmilla notices her breathing has slowed past normal, so she refocuses her attention to keeping her lungs moving. It’s more effort than most people think. It’s easier when she’s singing or playing, when there’s the weight of the song to drag her along. “Please.”

There’s desperation in her words, desperation that reminds Carmilla of all the times she’d say those words before. Always matched with, _stop._ But the fear this time isn’t of Carmilla, it’s of Carmilla leaving, and that’s something new or something very old indeed. Before she had Jonny and Aurora, when it was just the two of them. It was only hours before that facade had shattered. 

Carmilla isn’t moving now. Her hands are by her side, stiff. Like the corpse she really should be, by all standards, except the artificially smooth breathing. 

“Then, I won’t, but…” Nastya stands. Not suddenly, but close enough to suddenly that it makes Carmilla flinch. She is terrified, she realizes, properly afraid for the first time in so long. She’d fallen into a pattern with the new band, one she just needed to uphold, but this is the worst parts of new and the worst parts of old all at once. 

“Can I?” Nastya asks, stepping closer. 

Carmilla doesn’t know if she even has the right to say no, to deny Nastya anything, but she considers it because Nastya considered her requests. She nods, and Nastya wraps her arms around Carmilla’s shoulders in a hug. Neither of them feel human to the other, but that’s okay. It’s okay in a way that feels wrong, fragile and breakable, but Nastya’s body relaxes at the touch, despite everything, and so does Carmilla’s. It’s been so long. So incomprehensibly long. 

Her functioning eye wells up with enough tears for the years they’ve spent apart, and before she realizes it, her chest is wracked with sobs. Nastya is crying too, the messy cry she never let anyone but Aurora see before. Carmilla barely manages to restrain her own strength, keeping from digging her fingers through Nastya’s skin and into her back, and she’s sure Nastya’s bruising at the touch already, but she doesn’t break her. Nastya must know the danger; Carmilla has shown how dangerous her emotions are again and again, and yet… 

Both of them stutter out words and apologies and thank yous and assurances and all the little things they’ve never said, meaninglessly and without context. There’s no song here, just the soft whir of the Silvana’s engines and heating system, but it’s beautiful anyway. Neither of them make promises, neither of them alleviate the other’s guilt, they just hold each other, and it’s not enough. This will never be enough, but it’s a start, and they hold each other for so long. Eventually they’ve fallen to the ground, a mess of limbs and half finished sentences. There’s no happy endings here, not for a story so old, but this isn’t a tragedy either, because it’s not over. They’re ill fitted puzzle pieces trying to make a whole, so fragile but untouchable at the same time, and it is never enough to make up for what Carmilla did. 

It won’t bring their homes back, not Terra, not Cyberia, not Aurora, and the two of them will never fit the other like their families once did, but they’re here for now, and it’s far from nothing. 

Eventually, they split apart, and neither of them know how long it’s been. The other crew members might’ve even passed by at one point, saw the two of them, and moved on, unsure of what to say to either of them. 

“This can’t last,” Carmilla says, and she’s not sure why she feels she needs to, “It shouldn’t. I shouldn’t be around you. I’ll… backslide. Go back to being the person you knew.”

“I know,” Nastya replies, rubbing her eyes. Her face is stained with a quicksilver hue from all the tears that’d crossed her face. It fades, but slowly. “I know. But… can we pretend just a little bit longer?”

It takes everything Carmilla has not to break into tears again and a little bit more than that. 

“I’ll be here for as long as you’ll have me.”


	2. Quiet Out Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doctor Carmilla and Nastya navigate the shadows of their past in every conversation, but they chose to progress. They chose to change.

“Your hair is getting long,” Nastya remarks one evening.

They sit on opposite ends of a sofa. Nastya is beneath a weighted blanket and cradles a mug of hot chocolate in her hands, not bothering with the handle. She doesn’t wait for it to cool down, allowing it to burn her tongue, but Carmilla is reasonably sure it’s a matter of dulled sensory response, rather than an act of self harm. No, that’s not entirely true. She knows Nastya’s sensitivity to consuming hot beverages quickly is low for a fact.

“It is,” Carmilla agrees. Her rusty red hair is almost a third of the way down her back. She wears a black tank top over loose sweatpants and drains a glass of iced tea. “Do you think I should cut it?”

Nastya looks down at her cup and sees her hands are shaking all of a sudden. There’s a lapse in the conversation. They’ve mostly been avoiding each other, neither really knowing what to say, but they still end up here every couple of weeks. Trying to reassure themselves that the last time wasn’t a fluke. The fragile bridge between them seems so silly, in moments like these. Carmilla’s voice is the same now, inquiring about the length of her hair, as it was then, asking for her input on how to best split her skin.

But she counts to ten. She lists off the colours in the room, that’s blue, green, brown, black, and by the time she’s catalogued every inch of her surroundings again, she can breathe with some sort of regularity.

“It grows fast.”

“Not any faster than when I was alive. It’s a matter of perspective.”

Carmilla looks off into the distance, eye not particularly focused on any detail. Her only intent is not to see Nastya— not to study her. She runs her tongue against her teeth, lips closed over them so Nastya isn’t reminded of how sharp they are, and feels a sharp reminder of pain. She never knows where to position her body so it doesn’t hurt. It’s almost always a question of she’d rather hurt herself or what’s around her.

“We certainly have that,” Nastya replies, and then repeats a proverb that Carmilla doesn’t recognize. The words sound strange, put together oddly, and she realizes it isn’t originally Cyberian. Her words are heavier tilted towards New Texan today than they are usually, so Carmilla readjusts her perspective, puts the words through a translator. It‘s a joking reference to similarities between parents and children, one that makes Carmilla frown. She recognizes she’s starting to dig into the upholstery a second too late and the damage is done.

“I’m not your mother. I should never have tried to be.”

Nastya just shrugs. She doesn’t really believe Carmilla, which Carmilla supposes is fair even as it frustrates her to no end. She knows there’s no reward for this, that she can’t fix something so deeply broken it she tries hard enough, but there’s a part of her mind that’s whirring away, trying to solve Nastya like an equation. If she just substitutes the right variable, then things will be easy. But... no. Human beings, and the Mechanisms are fundamentally human beings, are messy. Carmilla seeing them like problems to be fixed was the problem in the first place.

There were a lot of problems. It could never have worked, Carmilla trying to fix her own problems by dragging others into her life. They never could’ve said yes, not really.

“You could do it,” Carmilla suggests. “Maybe stab me a couple of times in the process.”

That almost gets a chuckle out of her. Just the first syllables.

“Now you sound like Jonny.”

Carmilla exhales. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath. Now it’s her turn to count and locate the origin of all the different tastes distracting her sensitive nose. Dinner will be good, if her drummer’s the one cooking, and it smells like they are...

She doesn’t want to remind Nastya that Jonny is dead. She doesn’t want to let Nastya get caught up in the denial. She knows how hard it hits an immortal, to know that the only other rocks in their strange world were washed away by the tide of tile like they’d managed to convince themself was impossible.

“I’m not that loud.” Nastya takes a moment to think about it and nods. Carmilla adjusts her position on the couch, and Nastya instinctively moves back. She looks around, even, checking for the other Mechanisms to position herself in front of, but she doesn’t see anyone. Carmilla’s heart breaks again. Nastya has a better claim to the grief, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean Carmilla doesn’t feel anything at all. She’s not actually a heartless monster.

She’s worse. She’s human, all the way through, given power nobody deserves.

“I haven’t cut hair in a couple centuries,,” Nastya points out. She doesn’t adjust where her own ponytail falls across her back. She taps her exposed feet against the couch. No socks or boots. She would always wear shoes on Aurora, with, presumably, the exception of date night, but she’s stopped bothering aboard the Silvana. “And that was just a trim. Our metabolism is a lot slower than yours.”

“So no worry if you make a mistake. It’ll grow back soon enough.” The time between Carmilla’s comment and Nastya’s response is long enough that Carmilla starts to wonder if she set off another dissociative episode. She doesn’t try to rouse her from it, though. If that’s what it is, then Carmilla’s attempt to nudge her out of it could just push her further in.

“Who usually does your hair?”

Small questions. It’s always the small questions that leave Carmilla slightly off balance. Nastya is much more curious these days, perhaps because she’s starting to learn that Carmilla won’t hurt her for not knowing something she sees as obvious. She knows she should be grateful, that it’s progress, but it’s hard when Nastya is so tied into all Carmilla’s memories. When Carmilla starts to remember one thing, everything else comes with it.

The night air is cold, but the hand on her face is warm. Her eyes are bright, warm with love and life, and even as the air stings her lungs, she laughs. Not unburdened, certainly not free, but not alone. There’s a hand in hers, and that hand is tied to an arm, is tied to a chest that moves so unsteadily up and down that she can’t help but worry it will stop at any moment, is tied to a face. The ash falls like snow. The sky is choked with it.

And then they’re home, sliding between gaps in rubble and twisted iron structures, to find beat up mattresses on rusty bed frames. Her head is in that lap, so familiar, and yet, everything from then is so blurred. It’s a watercolour painting, bleeding from cuts by the sharp knife of memory. Her dry lips are cracked, but she knows the taste of life on them anyway, knows them like she knows the fingers that massage her scalp now. Her heart doesn’t pound. A gentle sound escapes her pursed lips, and then she hears that laugh, not accusatory. Not hysterical. Not even surprised that someone like her could be vulnerable. Both of her eyes are closed because she is safe. There’s nothing to fear when it’s the two of them against the world.

“Me,” Carmilla answers, eventually, though she’s got no idea how long has passed and if Nastya has said anything in the in-between. “In case you didn’t notice by now, I’m a bit of a control freak.”

Nastya nods, unsure what to make of the comment. Carmilla meant it as a joke, but it’s true. If she can control everything, she doesn’t need to be scared of controlling herself, right?

“How short would you want it?” Carmilla could give the exact number of cybermeters, down to the decimal point, and she could describe the layering she preferred in enough detail to fill a short novel. She could create a perfect 3D model, replicating the look. Her mind goes there without even asking, calculating the various angles of the scissors she’d need, but then she looks back at Nastya, who looks away, and she forces her gaze back away.

“You decide,” she offers. Nastya almost drops her mug in surprise, despite holding it tight enough that a standard ceramic mug might’ve cracked.  
It always comes back to control, doesn’t it? she thinks, with a trace of bitterness. Not towards Nastya. Never towards Nastya, not anymore. This time, her rage is at the whole damned world. The whole damned world and herself but mostly herself, and she knows it’s justified, because the fear and uncertainty on Nastya’s face every time Carmilla catches a glimpse of it mirrors her own, all those years ago. "Anything goes."

Control and grief. They haunt her, like all the ghosts she knows she’s made.

"Dye?"

Carmilla nods and keeps her hands firmly by her side.

She wants to change, and change isn't easy. It means letting go of who she was. It means surrendering control.


	3. The Ghost Of Scars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new present can't erase the ghosts of the past. And maybe it shouldn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for some description of past physical abuse.

“Hey,” Carmilla says, standing across the room from Nastya, who sits, slid against the floor, hands at her head trying to hold it together. Her grip is too tight, applying far too much pressure. It’ll hurt like hell, Carmilla thinks, though she’s not sure. “Can I come over?” 

“Amber,” Nastya says, after a moment of contemplation. Neither of them were really sure about using no’s, yes’s, and maybe’s, not after so long of Carmilla taking a no as ‘motivate me’ and a yes for granted. Colors work better. Something red is stop or go away, something yellow is slow and careful, and something green is go. There’s less trained fear when she says cherry than no. Every time they have to use this system, Carmilla’s chest hurts, too tight all of a sudden. She wants to wrap this kid up in her arms and protect her from all the dangers of the world, like she wasn’t that danger. Like she couldn’t be again.

So she approaches slowly. She doesn’t sit next to Nastya, though she doesn’t take a seat at the table in the middle of the room either. That’d be too close to looking over her prone body for Carmilla’s tastes. Or Nastya’s, presumably, but Nastya’s eyes are shut. Clenched right. She’s trying not to see, trying not to remember, but it’s not working. She’s stopped breathing altogether, and that makes Carmilla check to make sure she’s breathing steadily. She’s fine, for now. 

Carmilla doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t try to bring Nastya back, well aware of all the times she told her it was okay to scream, because it’s not like anyone who could do anything could hear, knowing full well Jonathan— Jonny— was so damn close. She just breathes, and soon enough, Nastya starts too. She doesn’t need the air, her blood oxygenates mechanically, but it tricks her mind into thinking she’s calmed down. And she needs it to talk. 

“Do you want something?” Nastya asks, and Carmilla looks at her. She looks away shortly after, not sure of what she caught in the brief moment of eye contact. Nastya focuses on her whole face, permanently messy and half-healed mess of scar tissue included. 

“Not sure. You looked...lost.” 

Nastya nods. She saw something in Carmilla. Not good. Not perfect. But something. Carmills lets herself think this is Nastya making a decision, but frankly, she has no idea. It’s been so long since she’s needed to read her-the Mechanisms. Nastya’s only grown more distant in the time they were separated, though whether that’s a function of her grief for her family or being around Carmilla after such a long gap is a question only she can answer.

“I remembered... you slamming my head into the wall.” 

Carmillla hates that she has to ask, “Which time?” She deserves to hate that she has to ask, but that doesn’t change the uncomfortable knot in her chest when Nastya has to think about it. Count the instances off on her fingers. It’s like looking at a picture of herself when she was younger, just a kid, but there’s nobody else to blame. 

“Not the first,” she concludes. “But… early. Before Ashes.” 

“I think I remember. Can I apologize?” 

“Not sure yet.” 

Carmilla nods and tugs at the hem of her black hoodie, trying not to unravel the fabric there too quickly. It’s a better habit than scratching up her skin, she’s been told, though her skin heals and her fabric doesn’t. Pain’s easy, though. It’s always easy for her. She doesn’t need to deal with the regret if she digs herself in deeper, refuses to acknowledge her own actions as hers, even when the line between what actions really are her own and which are the disease lurking inside her is so foggy.

She remembers her fingers around Nastya’s pony tail, gripped tight and near the base of her head. She wasn’t screaming yet, doing her best to hold her fear in, but she would be. She would be, because Carmilla wanted it. It wasn’t even about anger or brought on by a hungered loss of humanity, though she knows not having fed properly for almost a week had put her on edge, it was about control. It was about… Aurora. Carmilla flushes with a strange mixture of embarrassment and guilt, imagining her childish attempts to push them apart. She’d wanted so badly to be the most important person in their lives; she’d thought she’d needed to be their everything. 

Her nails catch on some thread and all it taught as she remembers the sound of Nastya’s skull cracking against a metal section of floorboard. Head wounds always bleed so much, and Nastya never fully got over her hemophilia, that room was a mess for days. There was a dent left in the floor, that’s how hard she swung her, but Nastya remained conscious through it all, damage to the brain healing just fast enough to keep her alive but not enough to protect her from a series of nasty concussion. It wasn’t that only one blow either, Carmilla kept at it for so long, pausing to let Nastya heal just enough that she never lost consciousness. She thinks she can hear Aurora’s panicked breathing now, feel the walls reaching out for her to try to stop her, powerlessly, but she doesn’t. She can’t. This all happened millennia ago, and there’s nothing that could’ve stopped her. 

Nothing except for her will. She pulls her legs to her chest, and wraps her arms around them, switching the position of her hands but not failing to untangle the fabric, ripping pieces of cloth across on such small scale. She’s intimately aware of where Nastya’s head is now, where her hands are, where the floor is. She can never hear her heart, long stilled and weighed uselessly in her chest cavity, but she usually manages to ignore that absence. Now she’s hyperaware aware of it, conceptualizing how her blood should be rushing through her veins, and she can’t help but see Nastya’s fingers splayed out on the floor, pale and soft and absent of the quicksilver Carmilla remembers so clearly. 

If Carmilla were to take ahold of Nastya’s wrist and adjust it so her palm was up, there wouldn’t be any scars. No calluses. Even engine grease slides off her, and she never stopped moving like royalty, no matter how hard Carmilla tried to beat that stubborn pride out of her. The thread snaps. 

It’s wrong. Unfair, that she shouldn’t be allowed to wear her scars with pride. She’s so graceful, delicately navigating the complicated labour of caring for a starship despite never going to any sort of flight school. Aurora taught her what she’d picked up by watching Carmilla work, but then, Aurora didn’t know everything about herself. Her understanding of her biology wasn’t intuitive, like a purely mechanical ship’s would be, and more than half those lessons would devolve into gentle embraces and intimate touches. It’s a miracle Nastya managed to keep her flying all those years without Carmilla. 

No, not a miracle. A feat of love. 

She thinks she was jealous, maybe. Not just that they would pay more attention to each other than they would to her, but that they had a genuine connection that could last through the ages. They weren’t halves of a whole, weren’t some perfect fairytale, but they made it work, something that’d filled Carmilla with a dark bitterness, just like when she’d see Jonny revel in violence he could control but chose not to. She’d said she’d wanted a better immortal life for them, so why, when they’d found it, had she wanted to tear it apart so much? No, it’s not just that she’d wanted to. It’s that she succeeded. Aurora is gone; Jonny is gone. 

She doesn’t tell Nastya any of this, not when half of it’s messy justifications. They just breathe, air neither of them really needs coursing through their lungs, and try to live in the present. The Silvana’s so much sharper than Aurora, so much cleaner and less worn from years of life, and the sound of wind rustling through her pipes is a metronome, rather than a rhythm. Still, from where they sit, they can see the stars. So many of them are already dead, their light nothing more than a ghost, and yet, they’re beautiful. 

So very haunting. 

“I want…” Nastya begins, struggling to articulate the thought. Carmilla doesn’t turn away from the stars, but she feels a change in the faint source of cold next to her. An adjustment. “Closer?”

“Summer leaf,” Carmilla says, a million miles away from here but still somehow home, memories of the embrace of a willow tree on a starry night closer to the surface than they have been for a long time. Nastya rests her leans her head against Carmilla’s shoulder, tension still present in her body slowly unleashing. Carmilla’s grip on her own knees slackens, and it’s only as her bruises heal did she realize how tightly she was holding them. Her eye flickers closed, and she leans into Nastya’s presence. “Can I apologize now?” 

“Yes,” she decides, and her voice is lighter than Carmilla has heard it for a while. Her hazel hair interlaces with Carmilla’s freshly cut and dyed cyan, different textures and styles and lengths but somehow similar. Somehow family, in their mismatched way. 

“I’m sorry,” Carmilla says, and the soft salt of tears stings the half-healed wound where her eye used to be. “If I could take it all back, I would.” 

“All of it?” Carmilla considers. There were good times too, weren’t there? In between all the pain and the hurt and the blood, they were almost happy. 

“Maybe,” she concedes. “If you’d asked me a year ago… yes. If you asked me a millennia ago… no. I don’t think I know anymore.” 

Nastya moves her head in a gesture Carmilla identifies as a nod, from her position pressed against Carmilla’s side. Their hands interlace, so slowly and with barely any force behind it, but neither of them as much as consider letting go. There are dark circles on both of their faces, framing their eyes. They’ve never been the best at remembering to sleep and with the other on board, they’ve been hyperaware of what it means to be vulnerable. And yet, it’s only now that they’re close that they’re able to rest. 

They dream of homes long since turned to ash and homes yet to come.


	4. Something Like Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ln between fireflies and the ground beneath them, the two immortals look to the stars for the places they were born and the places they died and all the space in between.

Nastya looks to the stars. 

The Silvana is parked a good couple miles off. The rest of the band is unpacking, probably ordering shitty take out, but the two of them are lying in the grassy dirt, and Nastya looks to the stars. 

Carmila feels the ground behind her. It rained recently, within a day, because it’s still wet, and the water soaks into her clothes. She traces the lines of grass and lets the droplets scatter. She doesn’t move quickly, doesn’t uproot them, and yet her presence is a disturbance. Nothing she can do. To not affect the world would be to die, and she’s not set to be buried for some time yet. 

Nastya’s simple pale blue dress shirt is quicker to stain than Carmilla’s beat up sweat shirt. There’s a part of Carmilla that really wants to pull her to her feet and brush the muck off, to push her hair behind her shoulder, but she’s not sure which part it Is, so she lets the instinct still. 

She breaths. The thought rolls over her, like a wave. She processes it’s presence, explores possibilities of what it means, but lets it go. She pushes her tongue against her teeth with the bare minimum of force. The pressure, harsh as it once was even with how gentle she is, used to be unbearable.

“Cyberia,” Nastya points, and Carmilla traces her arms to her finger, watching the way the fabric folds against her motion with something close to wonder. She makes a sound that could be construed as agreement or a request for elaboration. When she lowers her hand without saying anything else, Carmilla examines the night sky for herself. 

She has to tilt her head to the left, push her cheek against the dark soil and let the green brush against it, before she can see the constellation she recognized.

“Terra,” she says, and Nastya doesn’t smile, but she nods in brusk acknowledgement. The stars are old, maybe gone by now in this moment. The light takes so long to travel; it might as well be a ghost. That idea makes Carmilla’s lips creep up, gently, but she can’t put a finger on way. “It’s been a long time.”

Nastya makes a sound of agreement, without the same sort questioning note. Just a fact. So far away from the places they died, and so far away from the weights their lives had saddled them. Nastya with destiny and responsibility, Carmilla with irrelevancy and powerlessness. They were free from those burdens, almost. She should’ve known better, really, to imagine that cutting someone’s ties to their humanity would do anything but hurt. She knew how that story went. There are different burdens now, ones of power and perspective. 

She remembers night skies on Terra. It was rare to be able to see the stars, beyond the smoke and pollution, but it happened every now and then. They were evidence of a world greater than this. All the possibilities she was sure she wouldn’t ever touch but that she might, in a dream, drift away. There wasn’t grass like this, but she found spots to rest nonetheless. Little pockets of growth in the face of a hostile world. It was so beautiful, not despite the oppressive choke of the world because of it. Something real, something to anchor her. 

Now she traces her path across the stars, flinching as she remembers the smoke and the fury that she’d carried with her because of how easily that pain fits back inside her chest. She digs her fingers into the dirt, burying herself before the ache can rise up in her chest and strangle her. Journeys that lasted for decades sand explorations of worlds that took hundreds of years pass by so quickly, when all she needs to do is move her finger back and forth. She feels the sand beneath her nails, the fresh water on her lips, the machine gun fire tearing through her like paper… she ran until she didn’t anymore. There are only so many ways to die. Only so many ways to kill. She is an expert in pain. 

She feels herself drifting. She doesn’t know how long her mind is on the wind, scattered like petals across a grave, but she knows this world’s moon is further across the sky now. She thinks she might’ve heard Nastya speak, but she can’t process it. She wants to ask _what did you say_ , but she doesn’t want to suggest she wasn’t listening so she nods, as much as she can from her position. The two of them are instruments so far out of tune in opposite directions. It seems impossible that they could ever harmonize, but if they did it before— had they done it before— then maybe they could do it again. 

Carmilla knows the impossible like the very bones in her body. Plausibility cracks and shatters a million times over around her, inside her, and she can’t seem to scream out anymore. Not when it comes to the old aches, the familiar ones. Impossible just means something she hasn’t seen yet, something that, despite the odds, still happens. Once in a thousand years, the world manages to send her spinning like it’s the first time, and she screams at the pain of it. There’s a loss to learning secrets, an underlying awareness that however fascinating it is now, it will eventually become normal. Just part of her reality, as bizarre as that is. 

She tries to live in the now, as best as possible, but her future and her past swallows her up so quickly. She breathes, focuses on the greens of the grass and the purple blues of the sky, and refuses to let the waves overwhelm her again. In. Out. Is it worse now, knowing Nastya is here? Having that constant reminder of all her impossibilities? 

Some of the stars dance, flitting around each other and darting around with careless sport, and Carmilla realizes: they’re hotaru. They fly down and close to the two immortals, one floating right between Carmilla’s eyes. They’re fire captured in a moment, utterly fearless, because they don’t have reason to be. Their lives are so short, most of them will be gone in weeks, but they’re beautiful for now. They’re always in the now, somewhere between limitless possibilities and no options at all. 

“I haven’t seen hotaru in a long time,” Carmilla remarks, and she means it. These aren’t the same as the ones on Terra. Parallel evolution, more likely. She can’t see the stinger on these that made Terran hotaru so dangerous when agitated, and the longer she examines them, the more she notices the distinctions. Not predators. Scavengers, rather than menaces. She almost moves to reach for her sketchbook, pull out a pencil to sketch them with a messy hand, still shaking and aching from the overuse. It’s funny, how some habits died so quickly and some are irreparably entrenched in her, from her body to her mind. She pulls her fingers out of the dirt and does her best to smooth over the ground she disrupted, closes her eye and opens it again. They’re still there. Still beautiful. 

“Long time?”

“There were… similar organisms where I grew up.” 

Nastya looks at them with a new light. Neither of them discuss their homes much but for different reasons. Carmilla sings to get the feelings out, to clear her chest of the choking reminders of everything she was once and everything she is now and the irreparable chasm between them, and anything but the music is just another thing to crowd her chest, leave her bleeding and raw from the inside out from the overgrowth. Nastya never wanted to tell her own story, not out loud. She couldn’t lighten the blacks to grays, hated the reminder, and Carmilla knew it, knew she didn’t want to talk, would much rather to listen to anyone else’s tale than tell her own. 

She’d reached inside Nastya’s chest and took ahold of the pain choking her there and twisted it, opened her chest and watched the quicksilver droplets cover the stage. She’d ignored the screams Nastya failed to hold back behind almost blue lips, ignored the thorns she grew and the stiffness in her shoulders, not because she didn’t notice them, but because she thought, no, she was certain, that Nastya didn’t deserve to be listened to. She hadn’t hurt enough, not yet. “Nothing since?” 

“Not quite nothing.” There was a night on New Texas where she watched the hotaru dance their tragedy. A night just like any other, with a boy forced to grow cold too soon and a gun dropping from his hand, his fingers clutching at his chest. She’d been surprised when she’d first found her way to a desert, how cold things got at night, but she’d grown used to it by then. So many things she’d gotten used to. But something had been different, something that’d just felt so unfair. 

“But I wasn’t paying attention.” 

She nods, like that makes sense. It doesn’t, not really, but none of this makes any sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hotaru = Firefly in Japanese.


	5. On Violence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nastya's made plenty of her own choices.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Brief symbolic mention of being buried alive, off screen gun violence, Mechanisms-typical violence taken seriously.

Carmilla stands by the door, hands tucked carefully into the pockets of her jacket. Her lips are closed around her teeth, at an awkward angle that means the sharp fangs cut into her gums. Her eye patch is slightly askew, and she’s aware of how it sits on her face, exposing just a bit of bloody tissue, but she doesn’t move to correct the position. No matter how much it bothers her. Nastya’s seen the wound exposed completely before, seen and inflicted much worse. 

Nastya crosses her arms but more out of a want to cover her vital organs than anger. The gun at her hip is stolen from Carmilla, but she did say to take whatever she wanted, to make the Silvana her home, so is she really going to object? There’s a stiffness to Nastya’s position that Carmilla hasn’t seen for weeks, and she can guess why. Nastya doesn’t need a gun for self defense, not on a planet as peaceful as this one and certainly not one that powerful. It’s beautiful work, effective not only at killing people but at making the process hurt. There’s no stun setting. 

“I’m going,” Nastya declares, after the two of them stare each other down for a good two minutes. Neither of them really know how long a proper stare down is supposed to be. Not proportionally. “Are you going to stop me?” 

Carmilla breathes, and it feels like there’s dirt in her lungs again, because the words she forces out are heavy. 

“I can’t.”

“That’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit.” She doesn’t so much as look at the gun, despite knowing it could incapacitate Carmilla for hours. She keeps her hands on her arms, digging into the skin there, leaving little bits of mercury dropping down to the floor. 

“I can’t talk you down, and I won’t make you stay.” 

“So you’ll just make me pay when I come back.”

“You’re coming back?” Carmilla almost takes a step back. She really didn’t expect that. 

“Don’t know. It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to go.” 

“I suppose that makes sense,” she replies, still on edge. She knows how to be the monster and she knows how to be a friend, but she’s not sure of anything in this liminal space. Because the people of this planet don’t deserve Nastya. Carmilla came here for a break, because it’s simple and peaceful. It’s under her protection against armies and empires. She’s fought for it before, fought so the people of this world didn’t have to live with the scars of war, scars she‘s buried deep beneath her skin. “I could bring us somewhere else. Somewhere the people deserve it.” 

“I don’t really care,” Nastya replies, callous, “about your definition of people who deserve violence.” 

_No, you don’t care about the ‘why’ at all. Just treat people like toys and throw them away if they’re not entertaining._

She doesn’t say that. She steps away from the door, heart in her throat. Carmilla has the faces of the audiences from the past week in her mind. She knows the Mechanisms’ solo shows tend to involve more wholesale slaughter than the ones they did together, that they never considered the people who came to see them at their small gigs off-limits. She always seemed to show up too late to stop them from killing a couple, but without her... there were times there weren’t any survivors. And Carmilla’s destroyed her fair share of worlds, has a body count comparable to any of them, but at least she tries. 

Right?

Nastya steps past her. Then she checks to make sure Carmilla really isn’t going to stop her. 

She doesn’t.

The door slides shut behind Nastya, and Carmilla sighs, heavily. She trudges up to the bridge and sends the nearest cities a warning. Won’t be enough to save everyone, might even annoy Nastya into killing more on her outing, but it’s better than doing nothing. It doesn’t make her any less complicit, doesn’t stop the guilt at having broken one promise to keep another. 

She locks the door behind her and leans back into the captain’s seat. Silvana thrums beneath her, not sentient but still alive in her own way. A harbinger of hope to some, despair to others. She’s done her best to make sure she’s been the right thing to the right people, but she knows she’s failed before. Sometimes, on nights like these, Carmilla’s had to make choices without right answers. Choices between what’s good and what’s right. 

The messages roll in slowly. Desperate prayers, the kind she told them not to send because she couldn’t answer them. She’s not coming to save them. The pictures load, and she forces herself to look at every one of them. Sometimes she recognizes faces, sometimes there’s nothing recognizable anymore. In most of them, Nastya is there. There’s a dead fire to her eyes. 

She’s not enjoying this, not laughing, but she’s determined. If she just destroys a little more, then maybe she’ll finally be happy. Maybe she’ll feel like she’s home. Except this time, Jonny isn’t there to watch her back. There’s no cries of “nice shot” or pats on the back. Just screams and sobs of people crying out for help as she executes them one by one.

She doesn’t set anything alight. No bombs, no flash. Nothing as out of control as the slaughters her family used to partake in. Just brutal precision. Carmilla is impressed, despite herself. Maybe at the cruelty, maybe at the efficacy. She doesn’t kill everyone she comes across, just enough. It’s one city, and she leaves it, at worst, decimated. The cameras don’t follow her all the way back to the Silvana, but Carmilla knows enough to estimate her time of arrival. She washes her face before Nastya comes back, pushes down the guilt at all the lives lost. 

Not lost. Sacrificed. For Nastya to prove a point. Or maybe for Carmilla to prove a point to her. She doesn’t know. She just knows she’s tired of watching people die meaninglessly, and she heads to her bedroom. Carmilla doesn’t really need to sleep in the same way a mortal does. She can go for years without it and won’t feel at all tired, until she’s finally in a place to rest, and then she’ll sleep for almost long as she’s been awake. She does her best to sleep every night, because that lost time can add up in frustrating ways, but it’s not easy. Especially when her mind is as ill at ease as it is now. 

She doesn’t even try. She just sits on the end of her bed, adjusting her eye patch, and thinking. Trying to remember all the times she’s been talked down from destruction, all the things she’s wished someone would say to her. Nastya stops in the doorway, covered in blood. Red and quicksilver alike, it’s hard to tell which there’s more of. 

“You told them I was coming,” she accuses. 

Carmilla sighs. 

“I did.” 

“It wasn’t enough.” 

“I know.”

Only one thing would’ve been enough. Direct force. Would’ve been enough in the moment, anyway. Carmilla knows she’s still fallible. The Mechanisms caught her off guard enough times, shot her into space and left her flying for ages. And that was one thing, one piece of resistance, that she never managed to beat out of them. It just didn’t work. 

She couldn’t control her. She’d made Nastya, but she didn’t own her. 

Even if that meant loss of life. That’s what being a parent meant. Accepting her kids choices, no matter how much she hated them. How had it taken her so long to get that? The disease could only explain so much. 

“Why do you care?” “Hm?” Carmilla raises her shoulders in a questioning gesture. 

“About mortals. Your hands aren’t exactly clean.” 

Carmilla looks at those hands for a moment. Considers the question. It’s not like nobody’s ever asked her, not like Nastya specifically hasn’t asked her before, but it’s the first time in a long time that she stops to really consider it. Why should she care? She’s been alive for longer than Nastya, and sure, there’s been plenty of times where she’s struggled with it, plenty of times where she’s lost control to the disease, but those moments have never defined her. Never been the point of her long, drawn out existence.

“I don’t know,” she decides. “You’ve been saying that a lot lately.” 

“Is it a bad thing?” 

“It’s a bit weird.”

“Well, a couple of hundred thousand years changes a person,” Carmilla says, and she doesn’t mean to hurt Nastya but tears well up in her eyes nonetheless. 

“Funny thing, that,” she says, between uneasy breaths and beneath layers of gore. “I don’t think I’ve changed at all.” 

And Carmilla has nothing more to say to that.


	6. On Art

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: mentions of past abuse, specifically starvation and neglect
> 
> Alternate title: "Every crime we have a name for" includes art forgery, and Jonny d'Ville never was one to half ass things.

They stand at the work table, above her latest project. It’s an ambitious undertaking, even by their own admittedly slightly overblown standards. The tools are laid out, the chemicals in place, and they’ve run hundreds of preliminary tests. They know every part of what lies before them, every last little detail, down to the precise chemical compositions. The more they delay the actual work, the more risk there is of further damage. 

Still, they take one last moment to examine it in its broken glory, and it’s in this moment of preparation that Nastya steps in to Carmilla’s workroom. They’re not surprised. Not visibly, anyway, they’re good at never looking caught off guard, but they didn’t think she’d ever come into this part of the Silvana. Not on purpose. So they just tilt their head at her, a simple questioning gesture that doesn’t use up the energy of words. This project is hard enough work.

“You’ve been missing for days. Thought you were up to something.” 

“I am,” they say, measuring their words to use the least possible syllables, turning their focus back to the painting that lies before them. On first glance, it’s a well-enough known piece from the Rose Red War, depicting one of those very Rose Reds in triumph. Allegedly commissioned by the propaganda wing of Cole’s government, the “artist” had their own agenda. The cloned warrior stands in front of the broken body of Giant Slayer Jack, cutting an intimidating figure on the dusty battleground, but her expression is far more complicated. Her skin has a plastic sheen to it and the roses that adorn her, supposedly symbolizing glory in the Zantine tradition, are glazed over, the light hitting them at an angle that suggests they’re artificial. Almost everything about the painting suggests a facade, except for Jack’s body. His wounds are painted with delicate attention, a clear fascination with the subject visible to even an untrained eye. And Carmilla’s eye isn’t untrained.

Of course, it’s a forgery.

The real painting was destroyed in the final battle of the war, burnt to a crisp by misdirected cannon fire. Carmilla was there, saw the wrecked canvas and moved on with barely a second thought, killing yet another guard as she worked her way through Cole’s forces. Slowly but efficiently. This only became relevant when they saw “The Triumphant Rose Red” in a museum about a century down the line. They’d pressed the curator for details, and apparently they’d been threatened into taking the piece at gunpoint by a band of traveling musicians. 

“It’s one of Jonny’s, isn’t it?” Nastya asks, closer now. They nod their head. They don’t make a habit of picking up his work, hell, often times they don’t even realize it’s his until it’s already left their hands, but it happens. They never paid much attention to the less flashy of his crimes. Never really paid much attention to him outside of those crimes, anyway. They bite their lip. 

This one was easy enough to guess, though. The forgery clearly features a mustache and flushed cheeks not present in the original work.

The damage is extensive. This isn’t the first time they’d needed to restore ibut they’d lost itt. If they’d managed to keep it in their possession, it wouldn’t have gotten this bad, even accumulating thousands of years of dust in the storeroom, but it’d gotten lost for a couple of centuries a bit back. Significant structural problems had arisen. 

“Yes.”

They touch a small drawing in the bottom right corner. Someone else might’ve mistaken it for an artist’s messy signature, but Carmilla had seen a number of these doodles. Her own face, with an unflattering expression. Hm. On second thought, it is an artist’s signature, of sorts. 

“It looks familiar. Do you have any others…?” 

“A few. Not as many as you’d think. I like collecting art in general, and he was a good painter.”

Carmilla doesn’t hesitate a bit at the past tense, doesn’t feel an old temptation to bite their lip rise up almost irresistibly strong. It’s been long enough that she’s moved on, and she hadn’t seen him in millennia. He hated her. Which, fair enough. Most people have good reasons to hate her. 

“He never let the rest of us see them until he got caught,” she remarks, the awkwardness of the moment palpable. This isn’t the first time either of them have broached the subject of the other Mechanisms, but it is the first neither of them changed the subject. They’re on shakey ground, and it feels like the one wrong word will send them spiraling into an abyss. She steps closer. “What are you doing to it?” 

“Already did all the scans. Was about to start cleaning when you came in.” Nastya nods, and Carmilla dabs a cotton swab into the solvent. The first of many they’ll go through before they’re done. It’s not particularly large, in comparison to some of the absolute behemoths they’ve worked on in the past, but these things go quick. That’s why they’ve got whole cardboard boxes full of them lining the walls. No fancy tools, no chemicals there. “Are you going to stay and watch?”

She shakes her head.

“I’ve had enough of watching you work for several lifetimes. Just checking in on you. Making sure you’re fed.”

“I am. I’ve been doing much better on that. Just got my five century chit from hunger management a couple weeks back,” they remark, their voice flat enough that it’s not entirely clear they’re joking. It isn’t entirely a joke. It takes them a moment to remember the other question, the one they need to ask in response. “Shit, did I forget food for the rest of the crew?”

“We’ve got a few more months of supplies left before we need to dock. You’ve been particularly cautious on that front.”

“Recently.”

“Recently,” Nastya agrees, a touch of bitterness evident on her expression. Carmilla accepts the resentment and civil conversation in equal measure. She doesn’t push it any further, doesn’t challenge them. She just looks them up and down, before gazing at the painting and the gentle movement of Carmilla’s hands. Each stroke of the brush was so gentle, so seemingly uncharacteristic of the boy they’d both known. In art, they could find a middle ground.

In art, they could stay up for hours, arguing fervently but never growing violent. Their voices raised only in song. There was no death, no guns in faces or nails at throats, not when they were creating. It was an unspoken rule. 

It was safety.


End file.
